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But did I think it would last more than 13 episodes at the time? No, I didn't think that. I never know.

Something that I learned from 'Friday Night Lights,' sometimes if you have four or five scenes in an episode, it's not having less than having 10. It's what you do with those scenes.

Being in the industry, I've seen many situations where someone will get the call from the network where they say 'You guys have 5 episodes to wrap it up.' Then all your long-term story arcs gotta get wrapped up in five episodes because that's how many episodes you got left. I would hate to see that happen to 'Castle'.

At one time, whenever the hell it was, they wanted a character to come in and stir up the pot. They brought me in for 8-10 episodes and said we'll try it for that.

Doing a truncated series is like doing a long movie, which allows for a certain artistic freedom. After just 12 episodes, you can take a breather and do other things for your career.

The 13-episode model lends itself to a more serialised format, which is nice and gives writers a chance to breathe some space into it.

If you look at 'The X-Files' generally, we did 202 episodes. About 80% of them are not 'mythology' episodes, which tend to be the epic episodes. They deal with the big conspiracies, the search for Mulder's sister. They deal with what I would call the 'saga' of 'The X-Files.'

One of the last episodes was all about a flood. We were working in the rain till all hours, and it was muddy and it was cold and it was damp, and it was hours under the hoses. That was not pleasant. That was not pleasant.

Although there were only about 24 episodes made it seems to run forever. They take a couple of episodes and put them together, making a feature film once in a while. I had good fun making the series.